Posts by Will de Cleene
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Speaking of classic Media 7 humour, who can forget Simon Pound's How to Do an OIA. Informative yet pants-wettingly funny:
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Hard News: For want of some purpose, in reply to Graeme Edgeler,
To the contrary, the second bid process was designed to ensure the highest possible price was received.
Touche. One example why I failed Law. Nevertheless, it was the right policy for the wrong conditions. Not meaning to wave my useless BA around too much, but it's the old James Q Wilson problem of whether it is better to do the wrong thing with the right process or the right thing with bad protocol.
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Hard News: For want of some purpose, in reply to Damian Christie,
Actually, just to be accurate, both TV1 and now TV3 (which shifted its demo upwards recently) target the 25-54 demographic.
I wonder how much of this is down to demographic realities. The average NZer is around 43 years old, compared to, say, Saudi Arabia where the average age is something closer to 20. NZ has a bulging middle age spread and not the usual wide youth base with a tapering apex as age increases.
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Hard News: For want of some purpose, in reply to Rob Stowell,
I seem to remember the UHF sell-off left a few polytechs and community organisations with spectrum- sometimes for very little (I think highest bid won, but only paid the amount of the next bid- and sometimes that was nothing.)
Yeah, the second bid process was supposed to stop stupidly high bids. Unfortunately, the policy requires a market bigger than NZ can ever provide:
very thin markets at the time of the auction resulting in large differences between first and second placed bids (in one case the high bid was $100,000, while the second place bid was only $6)
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Even though some of them made a killing out of gaming public policy around spectrum allocation, those guys hate anything the government has to do with broadcasting.
I did a bit of research in the weekend on this very point, looking up tenders for the 80s-90s spectrum sell-off, trying to see the quality of the ladder being pulled up with the next round of tenders. Alas, I couldn't find any smoking guns, although bonus cherries were scattered around the place, such as how much was bought up by Sky, Telecom and the churches.
No room for public broadcasting in this round of re-allocations, unlike the first one, and the Maori stream only survives because the courts have said so.
It also seems fair to say that the Labour goverment’s approach was unnecessarily complex. Well, let’s just say weird.
Same went for the Charter, which I have had issues with previously. It is all part of Labour 5's larger problem; too much wool, not enough steel. Say what you will about the direction of Labour 4, you can't say they wrote worse law or instigated more flawed policy than during Clark's watch.
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Hard News: The frustrating politics of…, in reply to Ray Gilbert,
Oddly enough I can't seem to find the actual online interveiw on the NORML website as they have updated it and you can't currently access the past versions.
Here is the Norml News article on Helen Clark that you were looking for.
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Hard News: The frustrating politics of…, in reply to chris,
In all fairness Craig, you are right that NORML and ALCP’s disorganisation (and not limited to) would seem to be stymieing progress and your argument regarding incremental decriminalisation has merit.
Yes, politics is a thankless business. It's moments like this I find the story of the Little Red Hen instructive:
Everyone's bitching for bread, but no-one wants to get their hands dirty.
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Hard News: The frustrating politics of…, in reply to Russell Brown,
I know that people in a position to effect change have been frequently frustrated by individuals in the decriminalisation lobby. I have occasionally felt that way myself.
You can choose your friends, but you can't choose your activists. When you're lobbying for a change in the criminal law, many of the faces are those with nothing to lose. You won't get the judges, the public servants, the plumbers, the sparkies, etc attending a J Day.
And I'm utterly fed up with the number of experts, lawmakers and others who will talk off the record on their true views on cannabis law reform, but refuse to go on the record, fearing ridicule and professional ostracism. And with just cause. Look what happened to Don Brash.
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Peter Dunne killed cannabis law reform in 2002, when he struck it lucky with the worm while campaigning on a Drugs are Bad Mmmkay platform. In comparison, Jim Anderton was mere sand in the vaseline.
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Whatever happened to increasing the threshold for beneficiaries to take up paid work before abatement from $80 a week to $100 (Hasn't been raised since about 1991). But they're shaking down the paperboys for small change, so I'm not holding my breath on Key living up to that promise, even if it might incentivise part-time work in long-term unemployed.